CHESTERTOWN, MDTown/gown relations will take center stage on Thursday, November 18 when geographer Blake Gumprecht, author of the widely-praised 2008 book The American College Town, comes to Chestertown to highlight a wide-ranging panel discussion about college towns and the people young and not so young who live in them. “The College Town: A Conversation” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Norman James Theatre on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

View photos from the event.

Comprised of both townsfolk and gownsfolk, the panel which includes Gumprecht, three Chestertown residents and a city planner from Newark, DE will explore some of the enduring questions about college towns. Is every community with an institution of higher learning a college town? How do college towns differ from their surrounding communities, or from urban areas with similar amenities? How do college towns negotiate the sometimes conflicting needs and interests of students and permanent residents?

Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, will moderate the conversation, which will include open Q&A time with the audience and touch on some questions unique to Chestertown.

The Starr Center is delighted to sponsor this conversation about what makes college towns uniquely vibrant communities, said Goodheart. As Chestertown and Washington College both face decisions for the future, we hope that the discussion will help us to see our own community in new ways.

As a geographer, Blake Gumprechts interests lie in the personalities of different places. Using examples from across the country, his book examines what makes a college town a college town and what characteristics separate it from other kinds of communities. In the process of writing the book, Gumprecht conducted research on 60 very different college communities, eventually settling on 8 to profile extensively.

Published to rave reviews, The American College Town won the 2008 J.B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers and was selected as the Outstanding Academic Title in 2009 by Choice, a magazine published by the Association of College & Research Libraries. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, There are red states and blue states, and then there are college towns a universe of their own, anomalous political creatures. This brilliantly worked-out idea by a University of New Hampshire geographer is that rarest of things the first full-length study of its subject.

During the panels discussion, Newark city planner Roy Lopata, who was profiled in Gumprechts book, will provide an outsiders perspective on the nature of college towns in general. Chestertown residents rounding out the panel will be Chris Cerino, chair of the Chestertown Planning Commission; Dave Wheelan, a Washington College alumnus, former college administrator, and current publisher of The Chestertown Spy; and Carla Massoni, the civic-minded owner of a downtown art gallery that bears her name. They will offer their observations on how residents, students, and tourists interact in Chestertowns college-town setting.

The College Town: A Conversation is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the event. The conversation is cosponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and The Chestertown Spy.

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About the C.V. Starr Center

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience supports the art of written history and explores our nations pastparticularly the legacy of its Founding erain innovative ways through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. From its base in the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertowns colonial waterfront, the Center seeks to bridge the divide between past and present, and between the academic world and the public at large. It also serves as a portal onto a world of opportunities for Washington College students. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

CHESTERTOWNThe Kohl Gallery exhibition Marc Castelli: The Art of the Waterman, The Simison Collection, originally set to close at the end of Downrigging Weekend, will remain open for the next two weekends, November 5-7 and 12-14.

The exhibition features more than 20 paintings of working watermen and their boats by beloved Chesapeake Bay artist Marc Castelli. Seventeen of the paintings are on loan from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, which received them as a bequest of Tilghman Island collector Diane Simison. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Maritime Museum and the Center for Environment & Society at Washington College.

The Kohl Gallery is located in the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. Gallery hours for the Castelli show during these two special weekends only will be Friday noon to 6 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit: http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu.

Apparently the ladies have parallel circulation, like ducks. As blood descends the legs, it simultaneously warms the blood returning to the body and cools off itself. (See here for a more nuanced and scientific explanation.) I can think of no other physiology that makes it logical to wrap yourself in many layers of fur and feathers whilst leaving the leg-flesh so unprotected.

Now, I am not much of a connoisseur of the ladies (with the exception of Catherine Zeta Jones for whom I harbor a most unseemly lust) but these butts are impossible to ignore. They are just there! Jiggling at you! You want to scream “PUT IT AWAY” or, in the agricultural vernacular of my people, “Nobody’s gonna buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.”

As a somewhat oddly-shaped human myself, I can appreciate the power of the skinny jean. I can even appreciate the power of the thong under certain knit garments. But…all this butt this morning led me to the conclusion that I am (a) an old fart and (b) in for a long winter.

What’s your least favorite student (or faculty) fashion statement of the moment?

CHESTERTOWNKen Chen, a young poet praised for emotionally piercing, often wry poems that chronicle his relationship with his immigrant family, will read from his work Thursday, October 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the Rose ONeill Literary House, Washington College.

Chens collection Juvenilia won the 2009 Yale Younger Poets competition, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Louise Gluck, one of the competitions judges, wrote that Chens writings have isolated and dramatized the profound dilemma of the adults relation to childhood in poems of riveting intelligence and sharp wit and profound beauty. The poet manages to be both exhilaratingly modern (anti-catharsis, anti-epiphany) while at the same time never losing his attachment to voice, and the implicit claims of voice: these are poems of intense feeling, she added. Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.

In reviewing Juvenilia (Yale University Press, 2010), Publishers Weekly described Chen as experimental in the best and broadest sense of the term.

A graduate of the Yale Law School, Chen is director of the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York. He has been published in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007 (Notable Essay), Boston Review of Book and The Wilson Quarterly,

Chens reading is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow.

Incumbent: graduate of SLAC, BA in government, senior-level position in fairly generic information business. Talking points focus on “raising achievement for all students” and dealing with nuts and bolts issues such as finding classrooms, teachers, etc. for a growing school population despite budgetary constraints. Nothing all that exciting, but sounds like she knows her stuff.

Challenger: “classes taken” in [very generalized elementary basketweaving] at [solid local community college]. Work experience includes decorating the inside of houses and the outside of people (at least that’s how I translate “image consultant”). Begins by criticizing standardized testing [okay, you've got my attention there], then goes on for several sentences about the importance of “motivating students to learn.” Talks a lot about “vision” and “inspiration,” and ends with a motto with “baby” in the middle, and a verb on either side that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with education (but might possibly be a nod to budget issues).

Call me an elitist — and an uninspiring one at that — but I voted for the incumbent.

During final week
You must still cite your sources
Learning does not end

The last day of class
Too late to turn in all work
Come to class next time

Bell curve average
But this was a shitty class
Too many extremes

Advice for future:
Read the book, do all the work
Listen to feedback.

This approach is new
But I promise it does work
Be all you can be!

Or, at the very least,
Dont complain in typod mail
Hate reading your words.

I was filling up my car with gas a few days ago, and as I was getting ready to leave, some guy in one of those gigantic diesel pick up trucks, swerved quickly through a maze of gas pumps and people, and jammed his brakes on so that he had effectively pinned my vehicle in. He got out and talked to someone filling up nearby. They were friends, and they had a 3 minute animated conversation, all while his truck blocked my exit from the gas station. They finally did a fist bump and the guy got back in his truck and took off as quickly as he arrived.

As his truck disappeared, I said to myself in my car, “Fucking asshole!” Of course he didn’t hear. I wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t already left. I wouldn’t have said it with my windows open either. I know there are consequences for getting into something like that in the real world, and although I may play it fast and loose with fatty foods, I’m not about to risk my neck for the pleasure of telling off a stranger at the gas station.

I have a colleague who annoys me to my last strand of goodwill. His ego runs amok, and when he visits your office it’s only to tell you what an amazing thing he’s just done. You don’t have to worry about joining the conversation either, because it would never occur to him to ask about you. Anyway, almost every time he leaves my office – after telling me how he stunned the Dean with a bravura question at a meet-and-greet, or how his latest article generated so much “heat” among a journal’s readers – I say (under my breath), “What an asshole.”

But I wouldn’t say it to his face because he’s part of a community I live in (just like the guy at my neighborhood gas station), and I’m aware that calling someone an asshole to their face means something.

But in the online world, under a cloak of anonymity or pseudonymity, in the forums of ESPN or Politico.com, or even here at little ol’ College Misery, that name calling seems to be de rigueur. I refer, of course, to some of the personal attacks that went down earlier in the week. I don’t know if anyone called anyone else an “asshole,” but that was the effect. Even the modest thread about leaving some squiggles on a white board resulted in quite a bit of judgment that I can’t help but think wouldn’t have been quite so heated if we all knew who each other were.

I LIKE being pseudonymous on here. It feels like I have some freedom. I can complain about a colleague or a student, and the effect is that I free myself of some tension, and I give others the chance to say, “Me, too.” It’s what I liked about RYS, in fact, that chance to reveal things about the profession that we all hated, WITHOUT the bosses finding out. After all, I still wanted a job the next semester! I vented, and then when back to work.

But I was so annoyed with the name calling and attacks from earlier this week. It was like a particularly vicious Thanksgiving dinner I remember, where the huge amounts of wine and potatoes gave all the cousins the nerve to tell everyone else at the table what they thought of each other. Uncomfortable, especially since we still had one more day at Grandma’s house, and leftovers to finish. The next time all the cousins got together, we just bitched about the football and one of my cousin’s ex-husbands. We had a much better time.

And on this page, when the animus turns inwards, against each other, I feel as though we’re missing the point. This is a place where I come to get rid of the tension of my career, my job, my real-world students and colleagues. I’m not looking to be told I’m an asshole, or that I need to be aware that I’m now in the NFL! I sort of thought YOU were here for the same reason as me.

Some folks seem to take every opportunity to smack down others on the page. (And even though Jim say he’s left, there’s a new and active commenter who is doing the same thing.) And the posturing! “I’m in the right discipline, the one where we’re all smarter,” etc. “If you could debate as well I can, then you wouldn’t be so weak and such a pussy!” Good grief. I only act like that around REALLY good friends after chipping in from the rough, and they know I’m just kidding.

I know that this sort of wilding is pretty common on discussion boards and blogs, but I don’t spend much time in that world. I guess at the gas station I didn’t really want the confrontation. I could have gotten out of my car an told the truck driver he had blocked me in, but I didn’t care enough to get into it. I could tell my colleague to quit bragging, but I don’t see the reason there, either.

And on here, although I’ll occasionally think to myself, “Hey, ELS, wipe your whiteboard down, and you won’t have the dean up in your face,” the most I might actually write is, “Yeah, that’s a lot of drama for an error I’ve probably made myself.” Why? Why don’t I call ELS an asshole for not being as perfect as me, for not using that elbow grease to clean every last tail of every last lower case ‘g’? Well, because I’m going to have to see ELS around this online community for a while, just like I’m going to see my real world colleague in my office next week – when he regales me with his latest victory – and I’ll probably be at the gas station with no-neck and his giant truck again some day.

Maybe I just don’t understand how we all roll in cyberspace, how we’re supposed to correct everyone and everything from behind our online masks. And do it with a little flair! Even Yaro made that error several weeks ago when he disparaged American Studies inadvertently. (And he got called out on that, and he apologized for it.)

I don’t know what I hope to accomplish with this note, but I’ve thought about this week’s events for a lot longer than I had imagined I might. It made me not want to come to the page anymore. I just thought, “Fuck it. Anything I write here is going to annoy SOMEONE, and I don’t really need to be told I’m an asshole by a stranger. Hell, I have people I really like who can tell me that!”